Proprietary Content Management Systems

The leading proprietary content management systems are designed to scale to thousands of web pages and millions of web site hits per day. Licenses are often per CPU and can be six-figures each.

Although there is no licensing cost for an open-source CMS, the real costs of running a CMS - the physical hardware and Internet connectivity, staff training, consulting fees - can still run to hundreds of thousands of dollars for large web content sites with many content contributors and thousands of pages.

For million-dollar plus CMS installations, licensing fees may run less than one-third of the total cost. That said, for a small organization, an open-source CMS can seem almost free if existing staff use it to manage web content more productively.

Many proprietary CMS are available from ASP hosting services. This is a fine way to learn the system.